Pastel collage of Bolt surrounded by memories of friends, travel, bao buns, a cocktail, a notebook, and a laptop.
A few of the things that make my life rich.

Earlier this year, I spent some time in Kuala Lumpur.

I was staying in Bangsar, and I remember having a few moments there where I would think: this is kind of absurd.

I'm not really a touristy person. Even when I travel, I somehow manage to recreate the same introverted life I have everywhere else. I stay home a lot, work, find a few places I like, and keep going back to them.

But I tried to do things a little differently in Kuala Lumpur.

I went out more. I met people. I went to clubs, cocktail bars, talked to other people who were traveling, heard their stories.

There was also this small Chinese place on the street where I would go most nights for bao buns. It became one of my favorite places there.

Painted illustration of the illuminated twin towers against an indigo sky.
The Petronas Twin Towers at night, Kuala Lumpur.
Painted illustration of diners beneath red lanterns in a warm, narrow alley.
A lantern-lit dining alley on Jalan Petaling, Kuala Lumpur.
Painted illustration of a hand holding a tiki cocktail at a bar.
Cocktails on Jalan Petaling, Kuala Lumpur.
Painted illustration of a pink bucket drink at a street café.
Another night out on Jalan Petaling, Kuala Lumpur.

And in between all of that, I was still working.

The timezone was completely different from what I was used to, I was very far away from home, and yet I could just... live my life there.

A few years ago, this would have sounded like a pretty crazy thing to me.

Now I can decide to go somewhere and do it.

I recently saw a tweet from Sam Parr about having a rich life. The idea was basically that a rich life is having an abundance of the things that bring you joy.

I really liked that definition.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I do think I have a rich life.

Money is obviously part of it.

I don't really subscribe to the idea that money doesn't matter. It does. A lot.

But I'm also not particularly interested in expensive things. I don't think I have expensive taste, and luxury for the sake of luxury has never done much for me.

The thing I like the most about having money is probably the peace of mind.

Knowing that if something happens, I can most likely deal with it.

And also knowing that I have options.

I can decide to spend some time in another country without needing six months of preparation.

I can work on something that may or may not make any money and give myself enough time to find out.

Right now, for example, I'm not really working full-time in the traditional sense. I'm trying things. Some will probably work. Some probably won't. And I can afford to do that without constantly thinking that I need the next thing to start making money immediately.

That's a form of freedom I care about a lot.

So is being able to help people.

If someone I care about needs something and I can do it, I like being able to just do it.

I can take good care of my dog.

I can help my family.

I can give my sisters access to choices that might otherwise have been harder for them to make.

That's probably one of the things I'm the most fulfilled by.

Not deciding what their lives should look like. Quite the opposite.

Giving them more room to decide for themselves.

And then there is the freedom of movement.

I've tried a few times over the last four or five years to come back and settle in Benin.

It never really works.

Maybe one day it will.

There are things I love about being here, obviously. My family is here. Some of my oldest friends are here. It's home in many ways.

But there are also very mundane things about daily life that frustrate me much more than they do in other places I've lived.

And lately I've been thinking again that maybe I just don't want to live here full-time.

The difference now is that this doesn't have to be a hypothetical thought.

I can actually leave.

I can say, okay, this environment isn't working for me anymore. Where else would I rather be?

I think I would struggle a lot with losing that freedom.

Travel has changed for me too.

There was a time when I mostly wanted to see places.

Go to this country. Then this one. Check another place off the list.

I still like discovering new places, obviously, but I care much less about the list now.

I'm more interested in the people.

There's a line from Youssoupha about travel making the world smaller and, as a result, less scary.

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I think about that line a lot.

That's more or less what travel did for me.

The world feels smaller.

I meet someone from somewhere I knew almost nothing about, talk to them for a few hours, hear about how they grew up, what they do, the things they care about, why they ended up in the same city as me.

Sometimes that's it.

A nice conversation and then we never see each other again.

Sometimes it's not.

My first trip to Rwanda was supposed to be a one-month vacation.

I stayed for three months.

Eventually, I liked the country so much that I decided to move there.

That one decision changed a pretty significant part of my life.

It's where I met the person I would have my longest relationship with. And, if I think about it, probably the person who has made me feel the most loved in my life.

The owner of the Airbnb where I stayed during that first trip also became a very good friend.

We still talk.

We make plans together.

Whenever I'm back in Rwanda, I'm always really happy to see her.

I find things like that fascinating.

You book an Airbnb in a country you're visiting for a month and years later the person who gave you the keys is still part of your life.

Painted illustration of three friends sitting together at an outdoor event.
With my Airbnb host turned friend and her friend at Wine and Blankets in Kigali.
Pastel illustration of a woman in a red floral dress holding a drink.
The Airbnb host who became a close friend. Benin.
Pastel illustration of two friends sitting together, seen from behind.
From meeting in Kigali to spending time together in Benin.

Then there are the people who have been there for much longer.

Some of my closest friends I've known for more than ten years.

We grew up in relatively similar circumstances. None of us came from particularly privileged families.

Today we're all in places where, I think, we have a decent amount of control over the direction of our lives.

We're doing okay financially.

We can help each other when we need to.

We live in different cities now, so we don't see each other as much as we used to, but we talk a lot.

And we still tell each other some of the same stupid jokes we've been making for ten years.

I really value that.

Painted illustration of two tall friends walking along a leafy street.
Ernest and me in Cape Town, on vacation with Martial.
Painted illustration of four friends around an outdoor coworking table.
With Ernest, Martial and Ibrahim at a coworking space in Kigali.

There are also newer people in my life that I care about a lot.

Some people entered my life with one expectation and ended up staying for completely different reasons.

A relationship doesn't necessarily have to become what you initially imagined for the person to still matter.

I've learned that recently too.

And then there is Bolt.

I've had him for around four years now.

He was still very small when I was living in Rwanda.

He's extremely clingy.

Sometimes I'll be working and he'll hear me talking, come over, start rubbing himself against me and try to get my attention.

Most of the time he wants his belly rubbed.

Sometimes I'm busy and it's genuinely annoying.

Then I rub his belly anyway.

Pastel illustration of a hand scratching a white and brown dog beneath his chin.
Chin scratches for Bolt in Kigali.
Pastel illustration of Bolt beside a blue sofa and a person using a laptop.
Bolt keeping me company while I work in Benin.

He's been one of the few constants in a period of my life where a lot of things have changed.

Countries changed.

People came and left.

Relationships started and ended.

Work changed.

I changed.

Bolt just kept wanting belly rubs.

I love him a lot.

Pastel illustration of Bolt curled up on a raised black dog bed.
Bolt asleep on his raised bed in Benin.
Pastel illustration of Bolt looking up with his chin resting on my striped bed.
Bolt resting his chin on my bed in Benin.

And of course, a rich life doesn't mean that everything has gone well.

Some things have been very hard.

Some relationships didn't work.

There are things I wanted that I didn't get.

There are also versions of my life that I got close enough to that I had already started imagining them as real.

And then they weren't.

I don't really want to write publicly about some of those things, at least not now.

But they changed me.

They made me realize that there are things I care about much more than I previously understood.

Things that, before, existed somewhere in the category of "yeah, I probably want that someday."

It's different when someday briefly stops feeling hypothetical.

I still want some of those things.

I'd like to have a family eventually.

I'd like to fall in love again.

But I'm not really chasing either of those things right now.

I'm not trying to turn getting into a relationship or having children into another goal I need to achieve by a certain age.

I meet people.

I get to know them.

I see how they think, how they live, how they see the world.

And if something makes sense, then it makes sense.

I'm okay with that for now.

I'm also still figuring out what I want professionally.

For most of my career, I've thought about work in phases.

There were periods where I was mostly trying to learn.

Periods where I wanted to get really good at what I did and have my work speak for itself.

Periods where I optimized much more for money.

And I think I'm now in a phase where I'm interested in having enough room to try things without needing every experiment to succeed.

Maybe at some point I do something completely outside tech.

I've thought a lot about working with dogs.

Painted illustration of Bolt on a green leash beside the sea at sunset.
A beach walk with Bolt in Benin.

Maybe it's that.

Maybe it's something else.

I don't know.

And it's actually quite nice not to know.

None of this was particularly obvious when I was younger.

I come from a pretty modest background.

My dad lost his job around the time I was starting university, and from that point there wasn't really much of a safety net.

I had to figure out a lot of things myself.

But I've also been very lucky with people.

People gave me opportunities at moments where I really needed someone to take a chance on me.

I met people who trusted that I could do something before I had much proof that I actually could.

I'm very grateful for that.

I'm also grateful to myself.

I don't say that in some motivational "I did everything on my own" way, because I didn't.

But I did show up.

I took some of those opportunities seriously.

I worked a lot.

I made choices that, looking back, turned out to be pretty good choices.

I made some stupid ones too.

And eventually all of that got me here.

Not to some perfect life.

Just a life I genuinely like.

A life where I can explore things I'm curious about.

Where I can move when I need to move.

Where I can help people I care about.

Where I have friends I've loved for more than a decade and people I met almost randomly in another country who somehow became important to me too.

Where I can lose things, have my heart broken, get frustrated, change my mind, try again.

And where, apparently, a dog can interrupt all of that because he needs his belly rubbed.

There are still things I want.

A lot of things, actually.

But I don't feel like I'm waiting for those things before I can say that my life is good.

I think that's what I like about the idea of a rich life.

It's not really about reaching a point where you have everything.

I don't have everything.

I just have an abundance of things that matter to me.

And I think that's already a pretty rich life.